TECHNO-FLASH

TECHNO-FLASH

Tangemfe Dream. Nektar. and Triumvirat A Guide to the Whizz of it all.

In the Beginning was Pink Floyd, pipers at the gates of psychedelic dawn. Hell, they even used to write about 'em like that, even though the Floyd didn't always take themselves as seriously as their adherents often do. ("Take Up My Stethoscope & Walk" shows pure panache up the ass rn song titles.)

Pink Floyd managed to take all those sci fi sounds and make them commercial. But in the last couple years, they haven't done much of anything, though they did recently come out of their long hiatus to tour England.

While they were out of the picture, a slew of other bands sprung up to fill the void. For some reason, most of them came from Germany. They don't necessarily sing about sci fi concepts, but then neither does Pink Floyd. And they don't necessarily sound like Pink Floyd either, but they're in the same ballpark. A/

And anyway, you don't have to sing about science fiction to sound like science fiction ...

LIMEY FORETREHHERS, OR THE ALOEBAAANIRN OLO GUARO

(No idiomatic bugashoo exists in a vacuum, and any fool can see that the moogey boogie space-wizz renaissance embodied — or disembodied — by the likes pf Tangerine Dream, Triumvirat and Nektar would never have existed at all without the guiding lights and general pathfinding in the cosmic wastes accomplished by these bands. Verily, as Woody Guthrie begat Dylan (Bob) begat Bruce Springsteen, so there are traditions even beyond the realm of this galaxy, on the bottoms of the oceans deep, in the electronic laboratories where the clinicians of the New Rock cackle in devise of yet another strange hybrid; get those electrodal connections straight, kid! — Ed.)

Michael Pautland

MIHE OLOFIELD

Since classical music is just about as dead as the novel of-manners and even Stockhausen is running out of trad electrodes to implant in his opuses, it only stood to reason that rock, the big mocha artform of the Sixties, would produce its own composers borrowing heavily from the classical tradition. Mike Oldfield sequestered himself in a lonely recording studio and came Up singlehanded with all 9,387 tracks of Tubular Bells, a two-sided pacesetter among, contemporary light classical works that possessed such instantaneous and mesmerising appeal that when they made The Exorcist into a movie it was a shoo-in for the obligatory haunting theme song. The devil doesn't make Mike Oldfield compose, though; this boy's an achiever and still at it, as his latest epic Hergest Ridge demonstrates. Oldfield's influence on the new wave of EurosynthemesC bands is vague and uncertain — actually he is a bit of a transitional figure, and belongs to the same era as Nektar, T. Dream, -etc. The returns aren't all in yet on this prodigy, but early indications are more than reassuring. (On the other hand, John Cale and Eno could either or both whip his buns with one baton tied behind their backs.)

EMERSON, LAHE AND PALMER

Triumvirat, that guckenheimer trio with more synthesized energy than you could shake Todd Rundgren at, really oughta qome clean about the debt they owe Keith, Greg and Carl. Those long virtuosic keyboard flights, all the blips and bleeps we shared as I caressed your thigh my dear on graduation night, these foolish WEE-YONGs reminds me of nobody else but ELP. Who were themselves descended from the Nice, a group that Keith Emerson shared with some other Limey booters and used to hop up things like Bach's Brandenburg Concerto and Lenny Bernstein's "America" from West Side Story, which when interpolated with Dylan's "Country Pie" made no sense whatsoever. But that's the wacky world of pop for ya> frankly, we were growing a bit tired of all this tomfoolery, and are gratified to see the experiment in sheer antihuman exertion begun by Nice and ELP-turned over tora cell of steely and undoubtedly humorless Germans like Triumvirat. Meanwhile, ELP clean up the bucks and clean out the racks with triple record live sets. White's it all gonna end? Probably in Eno's bathtub.

YES

Interestingly enough, Yes started out not as kingpin promulgators of symphonic side-long synthesized masterwurkin, but a fairly straight British rock band with a pronounced Byrds influence'. (The Byrds, as we all remember, played space-rock when it was still alU12-string guitars and could laugh at itself, viz, "Mr. Spaceman." Before it became Art.) By their second album. Time. & a Word, Yes were beginning to spin their own special, specimens in your line of grandiose fantasies, and their third, The Yes Album, was the real rnpve. They "toured second-billed to Black Sabbath in '72 and stole the show and all America with their clean genes and perfect gloss. Whatever "Yours is No Disgrace" meant, it certainly moved, both in the grooves and ou,t of the stores into the headphones, as did "Roundabout" and 'Fragile, where the Byrds influence (especially "Eight Miles High") once again, surfaced most vigorously. By Closg To The Edge Yes were up to giving Jethro Tull some competition at weighty (and lengthy) art-statement swirling jams, and all two records (four songs) of Tales From Topographic Oceans was so much of something so rich that even some of the fans had trouble digesting it all. But the spanking-new Relayer finds Yes flashing onward in their finest tradition' of stardust cosmo-rock and Lord of the Rings cover'art. Though some connoisseurs will beg to differ, there most assuredly would not have been a Nektar as presently constituted without the looming influence of Yes. Byrd droppings all.

HAWHWIND

Among those second-wavers who didn't bother to drop the Floyd's sense'of humor in the process of copping their flight blueprints was Hawkwind, who are THE big cult band among the acid-lobotomized teens of England. Boom boom bass, synthesizer , squiggl&s like an octopus jacking off a convention hall, drone drone buzz buzz whizz whizz warp factor 8 Mr.; Sulu until we reach the outer beaches of the rings of Saturn where the bluegreen Pod.People breathe brown fuzz .like air and watch Old Captain Video reruns on their stroboscopes while the NoVa Police" comb the-silt-foaming deltas for intergalactic hit-men on the longest lam...